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06 January 2013

Disney-Venice with eternal sunshine – El Gouna at the Red Sea Coast

“That's not Egypt! It
feels very artificial and European!” people had told us about El
Gouna. We went there to find out for ourselves:

Pastel-coloured houses
surround the small marina; the outdoor tables of several cafés and
restaurants attract some strolling tourists. Several of the
picturesque houses are hotels, others are fashionable shops. Only a
short walk away there is another marina. A small orange-painted art
workshop is advertising pottery and art courses, and next to yet
another lagoon some Nubian inspired houses surround a garden and
pool. What a pleasant little village – for once in Egypt, there are
no ugly electricity lines, air-con boxes and concrete building sins.
All the houses seem to belong here, they are all well-designed and
maintained.

The whole village is built
from scratch in the desert for people who love sunshine, lagoons,
marinas and cafés. And all the houses are built or supervised by the
same company, Orascom Development. All the hotels belong to Orascom
and more than half of them are managed by them. The real estate
company bought the plot from the Egyptian government and started
building in the 1990s.

Ghada, the guest relations
manager, leads us around town. “The company stipulates exactly what
kind of buildings are permitted,” she explains. You even need a
special permit to put up a satellite dish. All the houses have free
cable TV anyway, so there's not much demand for satellite dishes. And
it has to be fixed somewhere at the back of the house.”

While El Gouna is
completely purpose-built, it is not only a tourist village. El Gouna
has a sizeable resident community of people working here, not only in
the tourist business. Ghada points to a building in the distance:
„And that is the church.“ Probably she means the mosque, Natascha
figures, since many Egyptians use both words interchangeably when
they talk to foreigners. It turns out, however, that it is indeed the
church: A majority of the Egyptian staff in El Gouna are Copts (but
there is also a smaller mosque in a different town quarter). We pass
a campus of the Technical University of Berlin, next to one of the
American University Cairo and the “Palace of Knowledge”, an
online-library with access to the Alexandria library.

“Have you seen the water
treatment plant with the reverse osmosis tanks?”, the hotel manager
asks us. Ghada seems relieved someone else asked, because she can
never remember the technical term “reverse osmosis”. We can,
because we have just visited the water treatment system in Soma Bay,
a very similar but quieter resort. And no, we don't need to see
another group of water tanks, however developed the desalination
system. Yet we do wonder about the huge golf course next to the
Steigenberger Hotel. Isn't it a waste of precious fresh water to have
such expanses of green in the middle of the desert? But Ghada insists
that the reused water from the 17 hotels and the 15,000 resident
population is sufficient for all irrigation needs. Thus, El Gouna has
a double water circuit – one for the freshly desalinated water, and
a second one for irrigation.

Our conclusion about El
Gouna: It certainly has this Disney-like feel about it, but then
again, many people pay a lot of money for a few days in Disneyland.
El Gouna is perhaps a better choice. It is environmentally friendly,
the staff is treated and paid at certain standards, the town has good
restaurants and nice hotels (and a good climate). And for the
experience of a (somewhat more) Egyptian town visitors can take the
minibus to Hurghada's El Dahar quarter for 10 EGP.

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“That's not Egypt! It
feels very artificial and European!” people had told us about El
Gouna. We went there to find out for ourselves:

Pastel-coloured houses
surround the small marina; the outdoor tables of several cafés and
restaurants attract some strolling tourists. Several of the
picturesque houses are hotels, others are fashionable shops. Only a
short walk away there is another marina. A small orange-painted art
workshop is advertising pottery and art courses, and next to yet
another lagoon some Nubian inspired houses surround a garden and
pool. What a pleasant little village – for once in Egypt, there are
no ugly electricity lines, air-con boxes and concrete building sins.
All the houses seem to belong here, they are all well-designed and
maintained.

The whole village is built
from scratch in the desert for people who love sunshine, lagoons,
marinas and cafés. And all the houses are built or supervised by the
same company, Orascom Development. All the hotels belong to Orascom
and more than half of them are managed by them. The real estate
company bought the plot from the Egyptian government and started
building in the 1990s.

Ghada, the guest relations
manager, leads us around town. “The company stipulates exactly what
kind of buildings are permitted,” she explains. You even need a
special permit to put up a satellite dish. All the houses have free
cable TV anyway, so there's not much demand for satellite dishes. And
it has to be fixed somewhere at the back of the house.”

While El Gouna is
completely purpose-built, it is not only a tourist village. El Gouna
has a sizeable resident community of people working here, not only in
the tourist business. Ghada points to a building in the distance:
„And that is the church.“ Probably she means the mosque, Natascha
figures, since many Egyptians use both words interchangeably when
they talk to foreigners. It turns out, however, that it is indeed the
church: A majority of the Egyptian staff in El Gouna are Copts (but
there is also a smaller mosque in a different town quarter). We pass
a campus of the Technical University of Berlin, next to one of the
American University Cairo and the “Palace of Knowledge”, an
online-library with access to the Alexandria library.

“Have you seen the water
treatment plant with the reverse osmosis tanks?”, the hotel manager
asks us. Ghada seems relieved someone else asked, because she can
never remember the technical term “reverse osmosis”. We can,
because we have just visited the water treatment system in Soma Bay,
a very similar but quieter resort. And no, we don't need to see
another group of water tanks, however developed the desalination
system. Yet we do wonder about the huge golf course next to the
Steigenberger Hotel. Isn't it a waste of precious fresh water to have
such expanses of green in the middle of the desert? But Ghada insists
that the reused water from the 17 hotels and the 15,000 resident
population is sufficient for all irrigation needs. Thus, El Gouna has
a double water circuit – one for the freshly desalinated water, and
a second one for irrigation.

Our conclusion about El
Gouna: It certainly has this Disney-like feel about it, but then
again, many people pay a lot of money for a few days in Disneyland.
El Gouna is perhaps a better choice. It is environmentally friendly,
the staff is treated and paid at certain standards, the town has good
restaurants and nice hotels (and a good climate). And for the
experience of a (somewhat more) Egyptian town visitors can take the
minibus to Hurghada's El Dahar quarter for 10 EGP.